Cruise (13 page)

Next, they visited the flight ops area, met the five pilots and copter maintenance crew and got more briefings on how the aircraft were used, their range, weather capabilities and capacities. Groff was surprised to see that both aircraft fit in the hangers below deck and that there were no external indications of the aircraft or the vessel’s capabilities of launching and recovering them. As they took a ladder back up to the main deck, they encountered two crewmembers on their way down. In nautical protocol, those going up have the right of way, but these two got half way down the ladder and refused to budge until Reinholt ordered them to back up. As she and Groff shouldered past them on the first ladder landing, both crewwomen made arrogant and rude remarks under their breath, muttering about “some people who were in for a surprise,” as they put it.

Reinholt stopped in her tracks, turned and addressed them both, “You are out of line, Campbell and Gossett. I will not tolerate that sort of rudeness or attitude. Ever. Consider yourselves on report. Be at Captain’s Mast in the morning, 0500 hours. I will deal with you then.”

Both offenders stared with malevolence at Roz and seemed to focus their silent anger more on Groff as the two officers moved up the next ladder and disappeared.

When it was over, Groff remained puzzled about the encounter and the unexplored aft spaces, but she had nothing conclusive to go on and thus put the question marks into the back of her mind.

Meanwhile, Hermann, the new Sous Chef, was in her quarters. As second only to the Executive Chef in the main galley, she was entitled to a private cabin. It was not as luxurious as those provided to Groff and Bibi, but it was, as she put it to her escort, “more than adequate”. Still adjusting to her new role as a female cook, she stripped out of the casual tourist clothing she wore for boarding and set about polishing up her new look. Wanda Mason, Harriett’s sex-changing specialist, had devoted more than three hours to fitting, coaching and criticizing Hermann until the result was acceptable. Wanda told Hermann that there were degrees of acceptance in any society and that in an all female environment like Altuna, it was going to be harder to pass as a woman because he/she would not only be evaluated on performance and looks, but also on that intangible quality that sets men and women apart.

“What the fuck does that mean,” Hermann interrupted.

“For starters, you need to keep your vile mouth shut. Be shy. You are petite. You are the FNG on Altuna. Stay low profile. Watch, listen, but keep your swearing and opinions to yourself. Don’t attract attention.”

“Shit, I know that,” said Hermann. “Any hit man worth his money knows that. Tell me something I don’t know. And what’s an FGN?”

“Fuckin’ new girl,” Wanda answered. “This is not going to be easy for you, Hermann,” Wanda said. “You have the height and weight in your favor. Your Adam’s apple is nominal and your beard, thanks to your coloring, is not going to be an issue as long as you shave twice a day and follow my instructions on make-up and grooming. Try to stay out of the sun. Wear the big floppy hats I gave you and the toque, your chef’s hat, at work, stay buttoned up, claiming allergies to the sun, (which is perfectly normal), and try not to work in bright lighting. Use your tinted sun block as a cover-up and it will help you a great deal. But you may end up sweating in the kitchen and this can be a problem. Work the cold side of the galley as much as you can and let the cooks do the hot stove work. Wear the high mandarin collars all the time and people around you will get accustomed to that look,” Wanda added.

“I don’t have any street wear. Should I show up in chef’s attire,” Hermann asked.

“No. We’ll pick out some tourist/beach wear for you. This stuff is big, bright and loose. With the big straw hat the rest of you is as camouflaged as if you were some Arab wearing a burka.”

“Oh, great, how old are you making me?”

“Thirties. Late thirties, I think. That will help. Your resume indicates that without being specific. By the way, can you really cook?”

“Yeah. Learned it in Switzerland on a long term job.”

“Really, what did you do?”

“You really want to know?”

Wanda nodded, fascinated. “Sure.”

“I poisoned a few people. Slowly. Untraceably,” he said.

Wanda blanched. “Poisoned? How many?”

“Hard to tell because they were all eating the same food. It hit some harder than others. One had a heart attack, another a severe allergic reaction, one fell down an elevator shaft, things like that. All untraceable.”

“My God,” said Wanda. “Were they all bad guys?”

“Bad guys?” Hermann laughed. “Yeah, sure. They were all government people in high places: Body guards, armored limos, all of that type. No one ever tied me to it. One of my best jobs, for sure.”

“Well,” said Wanda, pulling herself together. “I hope this assignment works out for you.”

“It always does. Besides, I love the tits,” Hermann said, smiling with a rare smile and placing his hands under and around his new bust.

“Yes. Well,” said Wanda. “Try to keep them away from the heat of the stove. They will melt.”

“Right.”

Back in her cabin, Hermann wanted to change into the new, tailored chef’s whites, but her luggage was still being checked by security. Wanda had carefully packed and inventoried the contents of a well-worn soft-side suitcase and a rucksack with everything she felt that Hermann needed, including a pair of surprisingly realistic breast forms, which Hermann now wore, practical and fashionable female undergarments, make-up, and two sets of tailored whites with the yacht’s name and his name custom embroidered.

Satisfied with her appearance in the street clothes and anxious to get started, she headed for the galley. In the best case, she thought, she might get the Lynx bitch taken care of before the ship even left port.

The reception in the galley was low key. Nora James, the Executive chef, welcomed her while working at her computer, barely looking up when Hermann entered her small office.

“All settled?” James asked, still pecking at the keyboard.

“Fine, Chef,” Hermann said, surveying the gleaming galley and facing away from the Chef.

“Great. You have the evening to get yourself squared away as we are doing light buffet tonight. Be here at oh-four hundred for breakfast set up unless I call you.”

“Yes, Chef.”

“Great. Welcome aboard ALTUNA. I’ve seen your resume and we must chat later about The Chateau in Davos. I worked there a few years ago as well, so we may know the same crew.”

“Yes. We probably do, Chef.”

“Good. See you in the a.m.”

Hermann walked back through the galley and took some time to find her way back to her cabin. During the evening, as supplies were still being loaded, she made several trips to and from her cabin, each time checking to see if her gear had been delivered, adjusting her make-up and making mental notes about the layout of the ship and then dictating these notes into a micro recorder. She switched from the straw hat to a baseball cap. At 2100 hours, she was summoned to the deck officer’s office and told that her baggage had arrived. It had been X-rayed, searched and passed by the security team. The rucksack and duffle were on the office floor, tagged with her name and a security inspection stamp. As Hermann picked up her bags, Marsha Clark, the deck officer, looked up from her paper work and said, “By the way, Chef. What do you plan to do with the Spare Air and night vision goggles?”

Hermann expected this and purposely left the goggles in such a way that anyone opening the bag would see them at once.

“It has been my experience that in the event of a power failure, the galley, which normally has no windows, is always pitch black. A former employer gave these to me so that I could make his favorite pate without power. I have found them useful. Is there a problem?”

“No,” said Marsha, noting that Hermann was not bad looking, but seemed somehow odd. Her choice of The Miami Look in fashion gave her a sort of out of place tourist look, so maybe that was it. She thought that perhaps this cook with a man’s name was at best AC/DC and more likely attracted to the rougher trade she would probably find on foreign ports. Still, she thought, giving her a toss might be interesting. “None at all,” Marsha said. “Given the collection of knives and other hardware you’ve got in those bags, the NVG just seemed out of place. A set like that is worth what, ten, twelve thousand dollars?”

“I expect so,” said Hermann, turning towards the open doorway. “And the batteries are the killer. But they’re no use without batteries.”

“Right. And the Spare Air?” Marsha asked casually.

“Just for my own protection. As a SCUBA diver, I like having the alternate air source with me and I carry both instead of just one. Sort of double safe, I guess.”

“Makes sense. I personally don’t like them as they have such a short use time, but it’s not a bad back-up alternate air source, for sure.”

“Are we done?” Hermann asked.

“Sure. You may go.”

“Thanks. By the way, Marsha, what’s your favorite dish? Maybe I can do something for you once I get settled.”

“Favorite dish? Ha,” Clark laughed. “If I had a choice, it would be Lobster Americaine, but that’s a little extreme. I’m a cholesterol junkie, so a good rib-eye steak is pretty high on my food list…then again…” Clarke winked. “I tend to like well-muscled meat, if you know what I mean.”

“Male or female?” Hermann asked, looking Clark straight in the eye.

“Either,” said Clark, equally unabashed

Chapter Nine

Tankage

Altuna left the Port of Miami at dusk with all crew and passengers accounted for. The owners stayed in Fort Lauderdale until the last moment, then called for a helo to bring them back to the ship. The launch that was on stand-by in the port returned to Altuna and was loaded aboard. Ingram, anxious to get to sea before nightfall, left the pier as soon as Fast Boat was aboard, then steamed cautiously through the Miami harbor traffic and had the ship well outside the sea buoy before the helo pilot checked in on the radio and landed three minutes later without any trouble in the calm sea. The owners went to their sea cabin and Ingram set up the evening watches.

In her early days, Altuna, under another name, had been built in Germany for a foreign government to transport dangerous political prisoners to and from distant and unknown off shore locations. The idea then was that a large yacht got preferential treatment and no one suspected that political prisoners headed for rendition would be transported in such apparent style. Later, purchased by a Columbian cartel, she was essentially little more than a top of the line drug smuggling ship, carrying drugs and other contraband, often disguised as harmless, very valuable pharmaceutical chemicals, from South American ports. When an effective DEA raid brought the ship’s illegal operations to a halt, it was sold at auction, totally reconditioned and placed in its current service as a luxury charter under a shell corporation operated by one of Norquist’s many firms in The Netherlands. The owners felt that the storage tanks would be useful for extreme long range cruising, especially to ports where fuel prices were a tolerated form of extortion, and so, the tanks remained in tact but clean and unused, mostly because to try to remove them would have required another major refit operation.

On E Deck, the tank deck, there were two corridors that run down either side of the ship, one on starboard and one on port. Access to the tanks was either from above, where waterproof hatches were mounted on top, or from one deck below. A duplicate set of lengthwise corridors had vision ports along its sides and additional hatches into each tank. When the tanks were in use, there was no access to them from here, but each tank had its own lighting panel next to the thick glass on the hatch. By adjusting the lights, an observer could check the tank contents. There were six tanks, each designed to hold about a thousand gallons of liquid. They had been carefully cleaned and were available to store anything of a solid liquid nature. They would soon see some new use.

Chapter Ten

Interlude

As the yacht moved through the Caribbean, she stopped on some nights at prearranged locations, usually a small sheltered anchorage or harbor, if they needed supplies. Norquist carried out his global business from his private office suite on the bridge deck, aft of the comm station, where he was linked to the ship’s multiple satellite antennas. With the latest electronic gear, he could and did communicate with anywhere on the globe and the crew often joked that he was really communicating with life forms on some other planet.

Once Altuna was in the British Virgins, there were fine choices for nightly stopovers and in many cases, the yacht simply remained at anchor for a week or more while the family fished, dove, swam in the clear, nearly empty waters or occasionally went ashore to shop and play tourist. Even the crew enjoyed these stops and was able to swim and dive off the swim platform or launches if the family wasn’t using them.

Groff and Bibi had, from the beginning, alternated watches and seldom were on station in the same place two days in a row. This preplanned security action peeved some of the all-female crew because they, as a rule, were not permitted to sunbathe on deck while the two security women could do and wear pretty much whatever they wished. It was already quite apparent that some of the crew had gender preferences that led them to look forward to ogling the two gorgeous young women in their typically brief European bathing suits as they stood watch on deck, often wearing nothing more than the bikinis, sun block, soft-soled deck shoes, sun glasses, a straw hat and the ever present canvas sling bag over their shoulder.

The bag contained an assortment of gear Bibi and Jean had agreed upon as essential to their security roles on the boat: a portable, submersible, VHF radio, a short range walkie-talkie for contact with the bridge, Ingram and the helos, a .45 Colt automatic with five spare clips, a pocket flare kit with five shells, and a Randall diver’s knife. In another canvas bag, usually at their feet, they always kept an H&K model MP7A1, 9mm sub machine gun with suppressor, laser sights, flashlight and several spare, extended 40 round magazines. With a range of up to 200 meters and a cyclic rate of over 200 rounds a minute, these Personal Defense Weapons, PDW, were, they felt, suited to anything from attempted boardings to the close confines of on-board combat. They also knew that for longer ranges, they would need heavier weapons and these existed in the ship’s armory. They also kept a swim mask with snorkel and a pair of speed fins close by. While they were on deck, they shared security duties with three other armed crew members: one in the nearly invisible masthead station which had full comm capabilities and was well disguised to look like an antenna dome, and two roaming guards that moved from bow to stern and changed decks each circuit. Among improvements suggested and implemented by the BJ team, as they were now called, Bibi and Jean created a random patrol pattern for all deck watches. This meant that any observer would have a hard time nailing down exactly where any guard might be at any given time during the watch. They also arranged for several caches of arms and other defensive equipment in various locations around the ship. These were kept secret and with limited access.